NASA is sending four identical spacecraft on a billion-dollar mission to study the explosive give-and-take of the Earth and sun’s magnetic fields. Liftoff of the unmanned Atlas rocket — and NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft — was set for 10:44 p.m. (0344 GMT) Thursday. Forecasters ...

Britons may have discovered a taste for bread thousands of years earlier than previously thought, thanks to trade with more advanced neighbors on the European continent. That’s the conclusion scientists have drawn after discovering that samples from a now-submerged prehistoric camp in southern England ...

Naomasa Nakai, an expert on supermassive black holes, is forging ahead with a project to build a new astronomical research station in Antarctica to unravel the mystery behind the birth of galaxies. Nakai, a professor at the University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, heads ...

A newly discovered solar system — with five small rocky planets — makes ours look like a baby. An international team of astronomers announced Tuesday that this extrasolar system is 11.2 billion years old. With the age of the universe pegged at 13.8 billion ...

Debate is raging in India over assertions by nationalists that ancient Hindu sages invented aviation and algebra among other feats, thousands of years before their peers in the Middle East and the West. Some in Indian academic circles warn that nationalist breast-beating could damage ...

Its fangs are not what makes the newly identified Indonesian frog species Limnonectes larvaepartus unique on Earth. The way it makes babies does. This little amphibian from the rain forests of Indonesia’s island of Sulawesi is the only one of the world’s 6,455 frog ...

Invisibility may still be the stuff of fiction, but researchers in Japan have developed a way to make mice almost totally transparent. Using a method that almost completely removes color from tissue, researchers say they can now examine individual organs or even whole bodies ...

Ebola’s symptoms may differ depending on whether certain genes in the victim are active or not, a U.S.-based research team said in a paper published in Science magazine on Thursday. The findings from experiments on mice are likely to help understand why Ebola manifests ...

You may not have heard of Henrietta Lacks — an African-American woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951 — but you have benefited from her. A few months before she died, doctors took tissue from Lacks’ tumor and grew cells from ...

U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe and Norwegian scientists May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering the “inner GPS” in the brain that helps us navigate through the world. Their findings in rats — and research suggests that ...

The annual Science and Technology in Society Forum, a three-day international gathering of scientists, engineers, university and government officials and corporate heads, kicked off Sunday with discussions on issues ranging from climate change to energy efficiency. Drawing more than 1,000 participants from 80 countries, ...